The End of Always: A Novel (12 page)

She dropped her hands to her sides. “Do you know what you sound like?” she said. Her voice filled with disbelief, as if she could not imagine that I could be so stupid. “They are all like that.”

I picked up my table knife and examined myself in the blade. Then I put the knife down. I could see that Martha was trying to regain her composure, but it kept moving out of reach, like a boat drifting away.

I could never tell Martha about Edwin. She had no compassion for those who were different. We had once seen a baby in town with a head so misshapen his skull looked like a bag of balls. And behind him, with her hand on the pram, came a woman dragging her dress, her hair uncombed and her face wild. When we saw them, Martha had crossed the street.

I did not agree with her. Edwin seemed as human as anyone I knew. The boy with hair like a bear coat had looked at me with the most lonesome expression that I had ever seen. He was human. They were all human, even the boy chained to the wall with the flippers for fists.

She would never understand. She would only believe that I had done wrong.

“Two nights in the woods,” she said, as if she could read my mind. “Two different boys.”

“I fell asleep,” I said again. I spun the knife on the table and watched the metal gleam and dull and gleam again as it turned through the light from the stove.

“You have to stop,” she said. She unfolded a pocket handkerchief and blew her nose and wiped her upper lip and balled the handkerchief in her hand. Her eyes were red rimmed and sore looking. “Please.”

I slowly turned the knife next to my plate. “I do not see why you concern yourself,” I said. My words hung in the air. Even I could hear my tone.

She took two steps across the kitchen and slapped me as hard as she could. The blow rang through my head. My ear on fire. Tears started in my eyes. I touched my cheek.

“You make it my business when he hits me,” she shrieked.

“Stop trying to protect me,” I said. “That is what gets you in trouble.”

“Oh God,” she screamed, and hit me again. And then again. Each of her blows was like a familiar thing traveling back to me. I did not resist. I just fell under her hand and forgot about Edwin. I thought of August in the dark, moving above me, his love and his strong grip, the way he turned my fingers in his hands until I thought he would wrench my bones into a new shape and I could in that pain give up the shape I had always known.

W
hen I left, Martha was down on her knees with her skirt hiked up so she could scrub the kitchen baseboards with an old toothbrush. I stepped down into our bare yard and came along the side of the house. Lavender light lay behind the clouds on the horizon. When I reached the street, I felt my breath come easier. The terrible aching in my throat began to subside.

My hair was still damp but I had brushed it and pinned it and washed my face and hands and no leaves trailed behind me. I wore a wrinkled dress pulled from the mending basket, too tight at the waist and its hem coming undone, but it was clean. At the corner, I saw Mrs. Muehls, her fingers pinching the brim of her hat as if she walked in a wind. She carried her shopping net with its bunch of carrots and its cut of meat wrapped in white butcher paper. She looked at me and then stiffly turned her face away.

In the empty lots, boys rolled hoops and pitched pebbles in the dirt. In the distance, the bank turret flashed in the early sun. The interurban clattered past and men and women looked out at me. None was August Bethke. The brown boards of the livery stable rose and the liveryman stood in the street and unbuckled a team from an old phaeton with curtained windows. He dropped the clinking harness and led the two horses on heavy hooves onto the dull wooden floor of the barn, where the horses drank from a trough. The laundry’s delivery cart came up the alley and the driver slapped his reins on the horse’s rump. In the window above, William Oliver stared down at the street.

He got to me before I could get inside. We stood in the shadow of the laundry, where a cool black trapezoid cut into daylight.

“Mary,” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair. He wore shirtsleeves and charcoal gray wool trousers, his white shirt without a collar and open at the throat, as if he had been up all night trying to sleep in his clothes.

“Good morning,” I said quietly.

“I suppose you imagine we will now have some sort of barbaric scene,” he said. “Is that it?”

“I do not know.”

“You do not know.”

“No,” I said.

“Do you know nothing about me?” he said. When I did not reply, he sighed. “I do not know why I assume anything,” he said. “You are the one with all the ideas. The philosopher. I am merely your humble servant.”

I shook my head and looked away. I put my hand on the wall. I imagined I could feel the heat from the laundry, which seemed to me more pleasant and welcoming than it ever had before.

To say I was weary was to leave most of my fatigue unspoken. I could see how everything had been my fault, but I could also see that in all of it, the things I had done had seemed right, first one thing and then another until added together they made a sum that no longer made sense. I longed for August but August did not come. I longed for my mother but she was dead.

The deliveryman led the horse into the yard behind the laundry. William Oliver glanced down the alley and then turned back to me.

“The question remains the same,” he said. “This should not surprise you.”

I bit my lip and put my hands in my pockets. “Mr. Oliver,” I said.

“Do not start that again.”

I looked down.

“The one thing we will not do is stand here in the street,” he said. “That is one thing I will not abide.”

He walked behind me as we climbed the dirty wooden stairs to his office. When we came to the top he pushed past me and opened the door and walked into the room. The warm wet air of the laundry rose through the floorboards. His dark Bible lay open on his desk and he saw me glance at it.

“Do not look so surprised,” he said. “Even a great man requires guidance from time to time. The rest of us must also consult those with wisdom far beyond our own. With all due apologies to your philosophical turn of mind, I find that I lack any such individual in my life. So it was John or Samuel Clemens and John won. At least, he won today.” He held the book up. “Revelation. How the world will be made new. Consider yourself lucky. I might have been reading Darwin and then where would we be?”

His words bewildered me. “I am sorry,” I said. “I do not—”

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do. Your father is something of a Vandal, isn’t he? I doubt he’s seen to your education.” He waved his hand at the wooden chair before the desk. “Sit down.”

“My father,” I said.

“Sit down, Mary.”

I sat.

“Your father,” he said. “He is not well liked by the better class of people. You are aware of this?”

The Bible’s pages, dog-eared from the places where he had marked pages by turning down corners. The smell of the laundry swelled over us.

“Let me illuminate. People see your father as something of an ill-bred thug. He lacks—what is it?” He searched the air above his head as if the word might fall on him suddenly and with great weight, like an anvil. “Grace. For lack of a better description.” He walked to the window and looked out. “He is just one of the teeming masses yearning to breathe free and that is no recommendation at all, I am afraid.” He turned to face me. “Of course, you know that I am counting on these very qualities. Especially when you seem ready to go feral on us.”

My mouth pulled but I said nothing. He made me feel stupid and then I felt ashamed and then I fell even more silent than usual.

“Feral?” he said. “No? It means wild. A child of the woods. A nymph of the forest. Raised by wolves. Romulus and Remus. Does this mean anything to you?” He stared at me. “No?” He sighed. “Your mother would surely fix this but your mother has left us. This must please your father. It certainly pleases him that men like me can no longer approach her and say the things we tend to say. Do you know that he punched me in the nose one night when I said something to her on the sidewalk? He did. The next week we had a drink and he told me that everything would be fine, as long as I left her alone. If I did not—” He lifted his hand to his neck and slashed it across his throat.

I stared past him. I was not going to discuss my mother with William Oliver.

He studied me. “Did he kill her? Has that thought crossed your mind? Perhaps we should consult a spiritualist. Call her to us and ask the question.”

“Mr. Oliver—”

“William.”

“William.”

“What.” He smiled at me, a smile unmarked by joy.

I shrank a little. “Can I go to work now?”

“Do you work here?”

I flinched. “I thought—”

“So we come back to that.”

“To—”

“To the question,” he interrupted. He stroked his beard and his eyes were warm and brown and hard. “We come back to the question, Mary, as we are always going to come back to the question.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pocketknife with a blackened bone handle. This he began tossing in the air and catching.

“Do you know what I did night before last?” he said. “I was thinking of you so I went up to see your father at the bar. I asked after his family. This is what men do, you know, because they have to work very hard to conceal the fact that at any moment they will fall on one another like a pack of wolves. And do you know what he said? He said that you were all fine. And he had that sort of Teutonic blankness about him that is unique to your tribe. You can be a cold and emotionless lot. So I believe the question is still in play.”

I stood.

“Where are you going?” he said. In three steps he stood in front of the door. “Sit down.”

I sat. He tossed the knife in the air again and again. Each time he caught it, it slapped against his palm and the hard muscles of his forearm flexed.

You always wonder what you will do if someone threatens you. You think you will be brave. You imagine that you will get away. But in the actual moment, you sit and watch the knife slap into the palm of his hand and slap his palm again and you listen to everything he says.

“I’m a patient man,” he said. “But my patience is wearing thin, Mary.” He flipped the knife as if it were a toy, a thing of no consequence, rather than what it was, which was the biggest thing in the room. I thought of the way all men carry knives; my father carried the pocketknife his father had carried, and even my brother Willie carried a knife from the age of six. My father gave it to him for Christmas one year, his only present.

“I do not have to ask your permission,” William Oliver said. “You should be grateful that I was raised correctly and could not live with myself if I did not show you this kind of courtesy. But you can see the truth of the matter. We are here right now and there is nothing to stop me but my own good manners.”

He studied me.

“I must say I am a little surprised,” he said at last. “You are a very daring girl in every way. I did not think I would have to do so much persuading.”

I took a deep breath and stood up. I would not let him do this without a fight.

“Oh,” he said. He smiled and snapped the knife shut. “I see. Our interview is over.”

“I am going to work now.” I pushed the words out as if they were punches.

“Right,” he said nastily. “You need this job. Your father. Your poor motherless sisters. That penniless boy who says he will marry you. And all the rest of it.” He gestured at the air as if he might make my whole world visible. But he made no move to stop me. I walked past him and opened the door and came down the dusty stairs and opened the wooden door that led out into the street.

Above me, he lifted the sash and leaned out over the sidewalk. “Do not fail to recollect,” he shouted. “End of day Friday. I will wait on you.”

When I got home that evening, Martha stood on the back steps like a stone angel, her face grim and her arms hard around her waist. Then the light shifted and she looked like my mother. The mark on her face had faded and I knew she had spent the day washing the floors and making the beds and trying to figure out how to keep everything as normal as possible, as if she could create a house where all of us would be safe. But she knew differently. I knew she knew differently.

She came down into the yard and put her hand on my arm. “He is waiting for you,” she said in a low voice.

I knew where I would find him. I walked as if propelled by something outside of myself, a magnetic pull as tense as a tightwire. Up the back steps. Through the warm kitchen. Down the dark hallway. Into the front room where he sat polishing his boots. When he saw me, he put the boot in his hand on the bench beside him and told me to come in and sit down. His voice mild-mannered, the tone of a man who plans to discuss something pleasant. But his look cut through me. I did as I was told.

He picked up the boot and spit on the toe and began to work on it, moving his rag in circles and stopping every so often to look at the result. Then he picked up a brush and turned to the heel.

He wore his work clothes. He wore the shirt that I had ironed the night before, and he wore the black trousers that I had washed and hung on the line on Monday and then pressed on Tuesday. He wore his blue necktie and his black coat and his mended black stockings. He sat with his legs wide apart so the dirt he brushed from his boots would fall between his knees. His hair was wet and combed.

Even if my thoughts had not flattened and disappeared, taking my words with them, I knew how hopeless it was to struggle against him. When he got an idea in his head, it stuck like something nailed in place. Once I had been singing a song when he came in from work, just a small song,
Go tell Aunt Rhodie the old gray goose is dead
, and I was just little then, could not have been more than eight, and he swung at me as soon as he came through the door and then made fun of me for crying. He worked at the flour mill in those days and he wanted the house quiet when he came home.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“At work,” I said.

“I see.” A clod of dried mud fell to the floor. “All of this time at work?”

“Yes.”

“From yesterday until today? At work?”

The dirt on the floor. The sound of his rag.

“No?” he said. “Not at work?”

“I went for a walk.”

“Like a hure.” He looked at me, his eyes small and round. “You know what that is. A whore.” He said the word
hure
in the American way, so it was exaggerated and sounded like a word spoken by some other man. He held the boot in front of him and turned it so he could brush along the side.

I swallowed, choked the way another person might have been choked by mud in a landslide, water in a drowning.

“That is right, yes? You have become a whore?”

I shook my head.

“No? That is not what I hear. I hear you go with many men. That you have a fine business for yourself up there in the woods.”

I cried and shook my head. The air in the room thinning out and vanishing like I would never breathe again.

“And why should I believe anything you say?” he said. He put the brush down on the bench next to him and spit on the boot and held the boot between his knees and began to rub it with his rag in straight strokes. “I know you are a liar, so.” He rubbed the boot hard and then waved it through the air between his knees and looked at it. “I do not listen.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks. The sound of the brush on the boot heel again. The house silent as Martha waited as quiet as death in the kitchen.

“Do I not provide for you?” he said. “Is this not my house?”

I could not speak.

“And I am your father.” When I did not reply, he stopped rubbing the boot with his brush and looked at me. “You answer me when I talk to you, girl,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. My voice strangled.

“And these things are clear to you?”

“Yes.” I blinked and looked around.

“And what I say goes?”

“Yes,” I said. And swallowed a sob. I knew weeping would only make things worse. He would tell me to stop my crying or he would give me something to cry about. And then he would.

He put the boot on the bench and picked up its mate and studied it. “So,” he said. “Now comes the question. What do we do with a hure? Can a decent house keep her? Can she go out among the neighbors?” He ran his finger along the edge of the boot and looked at the tip, testing for dirt. “No. No. These are not things for a hure.”